Obama, Netanyahu on Collision Course 6 Years in the Making

For six years, President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been on a collision course over how to halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions, a high-stakes endeavor both men see as a centerpiece of their legacies.

The coming weeks will put the relationship between their countries, which otherwise remain stalwart allies, to one of its toughest tests.

Netanyahu is bound for Washington for an address to Congress on Tuesday aimed squarely at derailing Obama’s cherished bid for a diplomatic deal with Tehran. At the same time, Secretary of State John Kerry and other international negotiators will be in Switzerland for talks with the Iranians, trying for a framework agreement before a late March deadline.

In between are Israel’s elections March 17, which have heightened the political overtones of Netanyahu’s visit to Washington.

The prime minister is speaking to Congress at the request of Republicans. His visit was coordinated without the Obama administration’s knowledge, deepening tensions between two leaders who have never shown much affection for each other.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the liberal Jewish advocacy group J Street, said Netanyahu was “crossing some lines that haven’t been crossed before and is putting Israel into the partisan crossfire in a way it has not been before.”

But the largest pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has tried to play down the partisanship.

“AIPAC welcomes the prime minister’s speech to Congress and we believe that this is a very important address,” spokesman Marshall Wittmann said. “We have been actively encouraging senators and representatives to attend and we have received an overwhelmingly positive response from both sides of the aisle.”

Nearly a dozen Democratic lawmakers plan to sit out Netanyahu’s speech, calling it an affront to the president.

Stopping Iran from building a nuclear bomb has become a defining challenge for both Obama and Netanyahu, yet one they have approached far differently.

For Obama, getting Iran to verifiably prove it is not pursuing nuclear weapons would be a bright spot in a foreign policy arena in which numerous outcomes are uncertain and would validate his early political promise to negotiate with Iran without conditions.

Netanyahu considers unacceptable any deal with Iran that doesn’t end its nuclear program entirely and opposes the diplomatic pursuit as one that minimizes what he considers an existential threat to Israel.

Tehran says its nuclear program is peaceful and exists only to produce energy for civilian use.

U.S. and Iranian officials reported progress in the latest talks on a deal that would freeze Tehran’s nuclear program for 10 years, but allow it to slowly ramp up in the final years of the accord.

Obama has refused to meet Netanyahu during his visit, with the White House citing its policy of not meeting with foreign leaders soon before their elections. Vice President Joe Biden and Kerry will both be out of the country on trips announced only after Netanyahu accepted the GOP offer to speak on Capitol Hill.

The prime minister is scheduled to speak Monday at AIPAC’s annual policy conference. The Obama administration will be represented at the event by U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power and national security adviser Susan Rice, who criticized Netanyahu’s plans to address Congress as “destructive” to the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

The Iran dispute has heightened a relationship between the two leaders that has been frosty from the start. They lack any personal chemistry, leaving them with virtually no reservoir of goodwill to get them through their policy disagreements.

Within months of taking office, Obama irritated Israel when, in an address to the Arab world, he challenged the legitimacy of Jewish settlements on Palestinian-claimed land and cited the Holocaust as the justification for Israel’s existence, not any historical Jewish tie to the land.

The White House was furious when Netanyahu’s government defied Obama and announced plans to construct new housing units in East Jerusalem while Biden was visiting Israel in 2010. Additional housing plans that year upended U.S. efforts to restart peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians.

The tension between Obama and Netanyahu was laid bare in an unusually public manner during an Oval Office meeting in 2011. In front of a crowd of journalists, the prime minister lectured Obama at length on Israel’s history and dismissed the president’s conditions for restarting peace talks.

Later that year, a microphone caught Obama telling his then-French counterpart in a private conversation that while he may be fed up with Netanyahu, “You are sick of him, but I have to work with him every day.”

Despite suspecting that Netanyahu was cheering for his rival in the 2012 presidential campaign, Obama tried reset relations with the prime minister after his re-election. He made his first trip as president to Israel and the two leaders went to great lengths to put on a happy front, referring to each other by their first names and touring some of the region’s holy sites together.

The healing period was to be short-lived.

Another attempt at Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed. Israeli officials were withering in their criticism of Kerry, who had shepherded the talks, with the country’s defensive minister calling him “obsessive” and “messianic.” The Obama administration returned the favor last summer with its own unusually unsparing criticism of Israel for causing civilian deaths when war broke out in Gaza.

The U.S. and Israel have hit rocky patches before.

The settlement issue has been a persistent thorn in relations, compounded by profound unhappiness in Washington over Israeli military operations in the Sinai, Iraq and Lebanon during the Ford, Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations that led those presidents to take or consider direct punitive measures. Yet through it all, the United States has remained Israel’s prime benefactor, providing it with $3 billion a year in assistance and defending it from criticism at the United Nations and elsewhere.

“We have brought relations back in the past and we will do it again now because at the end of the day they are based on mutual interests,” said Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and informal adviser to Netanyahu. “The interests of Israel and the U.S. are similar and sometime identical and I think that is what will determine in the end and not feelings of one kind or another.”
Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/US-United-States-Israel/2015/02/28/id/627463/#ixzz3T4pf6UBd
Urgent: Rate Obama on His Job Performance.Vote Here Now!

Sheriff Joe Arpaio Has A Dire Warning For Judge Standing In Obama’s Way

An attorney for Sheriff Joe Arpaio made a filing with the federal judgewho ordered the halting of President Obama’s executive amnesty, asking that a hearing be held on Obama’s refusal to comply with the court’s order.

The attorney, Larry Klayman of Freedom Watch, stated to the judge in the filing:

“Several reports indicate that the executive branch under the Obama administration has not complied with this court’s temporary injunction, but continues full-speed to implement a grant of amnesty and related benefits to approximately 5 million citizens of foreign countries who are illegally in the United States under the defendants’ November 20, 2014, executive action programs implemented by several memoranda issued by Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson.”

U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen ordered federal agencies to cease implementing Obama’s amnesty plan; but, since then, Obama has warned that “one federal judge” will not stand in his way toward implementing amnesty.

Obama, according to the Washington Times, “told a Miami crowd that he will move ahead with his executive action on immigration and vowed that his administration will become even more aggressive in the weeks and months to come.”

Klayman noted in the filing: “The Obama administration is continuing to signal not only its disagreement with the court’s order, which is its right, but beyond that its non-compliance with the court’s order.”

“In short,” Klayman told the court, “President Obama’s defiant pledge in Miami, Florida, on February 25, 2015, to move forward aggressively with implementation of his deferred action amnesty by executive over-reach … more than suggests that the Obama administration is continuing to implement the executive action amnesty in defiance of the court’s temporary injunction.

“Given the strong reports that DHS is continuing to implement the programs that the court enjoined, the court should issue an order to show cause and call for clarification and assurance from the defendants that they are and will comply with the court’s temporary injunction, and if not take immediate remedial actions to [ensure] that the order is being complied with.”

Klayman also noted that Obama is threatening “consequences” to federal employees who obey the federal judge’s ruling to cease implementation of his amnesty.

On “SNL” this week, “Giuliani” wrestled with his inner desire to be a hero on Fox News in a setup that echoed “Birdman.”

“You were one of the greats!” his inner voice tells him as he looks back to presidential ambitions of yesteryear.

Watch “Giuliani” pace the halls of Fox News and become a “hero” once again in the segment below:

7 Reasons Net Neutrality IS A TREAT TO YOUR FREEDOM.

By Nick Sanchez

The FCC’s Democrat majority voted on Thursday to fix something that ain’t broken by approving new regulations for the Internet. Republicans are dissenting, darkly suggesting that the new rules in government hands are a threat.
The commission’s chairman, Tom Wheeler, said the new rules will ensure net neutrality by barring Internet service providers like Comcast from charging companies like Netflix for priority data transmission. Considering that ISPs don’t do this, and currently treat all data transmission equally, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California, accused the FCC of trying to “fix something that is far from broken.”
Here are 7 reasons why the FCC’s new net neutrality rules could be a threat to your freedom.

The FCC’s new rules are a heavy-handed government takeover of the Internet.

Under the new rules, broadband Internet is classified as a public utility for the first time ever. This gives the government wide control of private companies like Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable, reducing their incentives to invest in their respective networks. Without this investment, broadband technology will develop more slowly, and prices will be higher for consumers.

2. Net neutrality subsidizes large companies like Netflix and Facebook who don’t need it.
In November, it was widely reported that Netflix alone accounts for over 35 percent of all Internet traffic in the US. If broadband providers were able to charge Netflix a small fee for the high volume of data they send, they could pass that money onto consumers in the form of lower monthly bills.

3. The new rules subvert democracy and the will of the people.CBS News reported that two in three Americans are opposed to the idea of government regulating the Internet. Other polls show that opposition to net neutrality is even higher.

4. The new regulations will stifle free speech.

Lee E. Goodman, former chairman and a current commissioner of the Federal Election Commission, told Newsmax TV that a government takeover of the Internet will chill political speech.

“The government will regulate the content — and specifically the political content — that the American people can both post online to express their own political opinions, and the political content and information that people can access from the Internet,” said Goodman, who was appointed to the FEC in 2013 by President Obama.

5. The rule-making process was corrupted by the White House.
President Obama and White House staffers used backchannel meetings to pressure Chairman Wheeler into creating the strongest possible net neutrality rules over the more moderate approach he originally intended. In this way, the White House operated “like a parallel version of the FCC itself,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

6. The commission’s vote wasn’t transparent.

The new set of rules ushered in by Thursday’s 3-2 vote were not provided to the public for comment. Ahead of the vote, one of the agency’s five commissioners, Ajit Pai, tweeted a picture of the 317-page plan that he was barred from showing the public. Even after the vote, the rules will not be published publicly for many days.

7. The new rules will hurt the right to privacy, and further empower the federal government to spy on its citizens.
After Edward Snowden leaked the NSA’s secret PRISM surveillance program in 2013, it became clear that the federal government is interested in snooping around in the private affairs of its citizens. Now that the federal government controls the web, its ability to spy will only increase.